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English Phonetics

Phonetics is the discipline of linguistics that focuses on the study of the sounds used in speech. There are three major sub-fields of phonetics, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the sounds used in speech and communication.

Auditory phonetics:

 Auditory phonetics looks at how people perceive the sound they hear.

Acoustic phonetics:

Acoustic phonetics looks at the waves involved in speech sounds and how they are interpreted by the human ear.

Articulatory phonetics:

Articulatory phonetics looks at how sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus.

The International Phonetics Association has special alphabets for describing all of the different sounds or phones, currently thought to to be used in human speech. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has more than 100 distinct phones listed and given distinct notation. Sounds can be separated into a number of different groups, based on whether they use air from the lungs or not, whether they are voiced or voiceless, the position of the tongue in the mouth, and how the sound is altered.
There are 44 phonemes in English language. These 44 phonemes are divided into two categories i.e consonants and vowels. Then vowels are further divided into two major and one minor category i.e. pure vowel/monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs respectively. 
There are two types of sounds i.e. voiced or voiceless.
Voiced sounds are like those you make when you sing. All the vowels are voiced and some of the consonants.
Voiceless sounds are like those you make when you whisper. The voiceless consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /θ/, /s/, /ʃ/, /tʃ/ and /h/.

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